A retired police lieutenant fatally shot a woman during a training exercise at a Washington D.C. library, authorities said.
According to a Friday statement from the Metropolitan Police, Jesse Porter, 58, a former lieutenant with the Metropolitan Police Department, was arrested after 25-year-old Maurica Manyan, of Indian Head, Maryland, was killed.
He is accused of involuntary manslaughter.
Porter was working for a private contractor that was training police who work for the library system when the incident happened Thursday afternoon, police said.
He was teaching officers how to use expendable batons when he fired a single shot from his firearm, police said.
The instructor discharged a single shot from a firearm that struck the decedent while he was in the conference room. A person with a gun was found on the scene, police said.
There were about six people in the room at the time of the shooting, including other library police officers. The city's public library system has a force of full-time special police officers.
The Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee said it was not clear why Porter had live ammunition during the exercise.
It is not good practice, Contee said at a news conference. I am not sure if the trainer had a live weapon in the training environment. A police report filed in Superior Court for the District of Columbia detailed witness accounts of the shooting. When an officer arrived on scene Thursday at the Anacostia Neighborhood Library, Porter was one of two people performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Manyan.
Porter told that officer the group was taking a class picture and joking around when he removed his weapon from his holster and heard it discharge.
The defendant kept repeating something to the effect of, I thought I had my training gun. Why did I do this? Is she okay? The police report said.
Porter had a weapon with live ammunition, but there were several brightly colored plastic training guns that were found to be incapable of firing projectiles and commonly used in law enforcement training, the report said.
The report said that the shooting was captured on library cameras.
Radcliffe Manyan, a brother in Prince George's County in Maryland, said Friday his sister was a lovely person. She was a mother and took care of her father, he said.
Radcliffe Manyan said his family was grieving and trying to figure out what happened.
He said that his sibling's ultimate goal was to break into a government job, as a police officer or otherwise.
Radcliffe Manyan said this was her first step.